Again, Haimish moved his cane to sweep Junius’s fingers aside. “No, kindly leave the Grimoire alone, Junius.”
“I shall take it back with me, of course,” Junius Midion said carelessly as he stepped back from the table.
“You shall do no such thing. Oh, you managed to warn me to look for the Grimoire, but I remind you, my servants found it. It is mine. Remember, I shall use it to send you back, of course, but after doing so, I shall see that it is safely kept.”
“Safely kept?” sneered Junius. “You just admitted the people in this world of yours are real. It would be far safer with me, where there are only the actor automatons and the spectral audience. No one in my world could use the book.”
“How about that son of yours, that frustrated young Augustus?” countered Haimish. “Oh, dear, I can just imagine what might happen should he get his hands on the Grimoire. You know what would occur should he open the book to your chapter whilst in your world, of course.”
“The spell would reverse,” Junius said. “It would cast our whole family back into our time and place on Earth, and we would age and die. Of course I’d let them all know that, and that would be enough—”
“No, it would not be enough,” Haimish said smoothly. “Not nearly enough, not when your theater-mad family is involved. If you go back to Earth, the book goes back to Earth as well, and I’ll not have the gateway to my world available to any meddling fool who can use a simple spell.”
Junius glared at his brother with something like hatred. “Need I remind you that I am the elder?”
“And I am the wiser. Junius, be reasonable. I agreed to consult with you and learn why this book has turned up here, of all places. It poses us quite a problem, but after all, I have the Grimoire, Junius, and here it shall remain.” Haimish Midion picked up the book, crossed the room, and stopped in front of a massive desk. He fished in his pocket for a key, unlocked a drawer of the desk, and dropped the book inside. “There it shall rest until we find this boy, and once we have dealt with him, I shall use it to send you back to your poor decaying theater. But I shall keep it, make no mistake.”
Junius had been watching him with an expression of rage. “Oh, very well! We shall decide what to do with the Grimoire in due time. But first capture that wretched boy, Haimish.”
“If only you could tell me his full name. A good magician can control anything if he knows its true name, but of course you have no idea, do you?” Haimish asked in a nasty tone.
“I may not know his full name, but I warn you, he is a Midion. He said he was, and anyway, I could recognize him by his features—eyes midnight blue, hair like rusty gold, all that. He may be dangerous.”
“How old is he?”
Junius shrugged. “I don’t know. Twelve, thirteen perhaps.”
“Then his training surely is nowhere near complete. I can deal with any trifling spells he might have mastered.”
“You couldn’t find him in your precious forest!”
Haimish shrugged. “Peasants are so easy to hunt. I fear my abilities as a stalker have become dulled by hunting mere criminals. Yes, I agree, I should have had the two wretches brought here to the palace. I thought it would be fun to hunt some real game for a change, and that was a mistake. He used a lightning spell! Crude, crude, but so crude I did not expect it.”
“What if he does it again? What if he blasts your animal guards?” Junius sounded upset and angry. “If he got close enough, he might even destroy the Grimoire with a spell like that, and you know that would be the end of us!”
Haimish snorted. “He won’t even be able to try, not in town. My magic rules here, you know. Come, it is time to eat. I shall send my servants to post notices in town. Anyone who finds him and brings him here will be exempt from the hunt forever, him and all his family. That will make people eager to find our young Midion for us. Do you know, I almost hope this boy has some real power. I haven’t had a really challenging hunt in so long now....” Still talking, Haimish escorted Junius from the room.
Jarvey immediately hurried over to the desk. It was enormous, made of some heavy, very dark wood. He tugged at the drawer, found it firmly locked, as he had expected, and hunted around for something to use to break the lock. Nothing. He heard the door rattling, and realized that in the next room Betsy was trying to find a way out.
He paused, biting his lip. If he opened the door, Betsy would ignore him, because of the spell he had cast. If she slipped away, the cobras might get her, or Haimish might hunt her. She was safer locked up, at least for the moment.
Jarvey found a poker in a stand in front of the fireplace, but it was too big and clumsy to use. A pair of crossed swords over the mantel offered a possibility. He dragged a chair over, climbed on it, and took down one of the swords, but its blade was too thick to force into the crack around the desk drawer. Jarvey was feeling more and more frustrated and upset. All he needed was something to open the stupid drawer. He made a fist and pounded on it once.
Crack! The wood split with a sound almost as loud as a pistol shot, making Jarvey jump in surprise. He opened his hand and looked at it in wonder. Had he just worked another spell? He must have. The wood was thick and tough, and yet a half-inch wide crack had opened right across the top of the drawer. He tugged at the handle, and the drawer creaked out of the desk, just far enough to let him reach in and pull out the Grimoire.
Then he crossed to the locked door, turned the latch, and the door swung open. Betsy had hauled chairs over and was climbing up, trying to get over the transom. She looked down in shock. “Jarvey!”
She could see him again. “Come on. I’ve got the book. We have to—”
“Stop right there!”
Jarvey spun around. Haimish and Junius Midion had burst into the room, and they stood staring furiously at him. Haimish had raised his cane and waved it, reciting some spell.
“Grab my arm!” Jarvey yelled, opening the catch of the Grimoire. Betsy grabbed the book instead, but he had no time to lose.
Just as Junius and Haimish Midion shouted out spells of their own, Jarvey yelled, “Abrire ultimas!”
The Grimoire writhed, and with explosions of light all around him, Jarvey plunged into the unknown.
12
Comforts of home
It was like being on a runaway amusement-park ride, and the spinning made him feel deathly sick. He and Betsy were holding on to the Grimoire, but they were on opposite sides, and they were whirling around each other, so it was hard to hold on. Jarvey felt his grip begin to slip on the leather cover, and desperately he tightened his fingers.
No use! He lost his hold, clawed frantically at nothing but air, and then he felt himself flipping head over heels and heels over head through a dark, terrible tunnel. He couldn’t yell, he couldn’t see, he couldn’t even breathe. It felt as though he were free-falling from a great height, and he cringed as he imagined the bone-shattering impact.
But it never came. Jarvey opened his eyes in darkness. He lay tangled in sheets, and he was sweating so much he felt soaked. Jarvey kicked and writhed and flailed until he had unwrapped himself, flipped over onto his stomach, and then he saw the red digital display of his clock radio: 5:10.
“No,” he groaned. It was all happening again. He felt around until he located the lamp on his bedside table and switched it on. Warm light flooded his room, and this time it was his room, without any doubt, red curtains, black blinds, his junk on the desk, his clothes on the floor, everything in place, just as he remembered it from dreams, from real life.
The air felt hot, though, very hot, and stuffy. He went to the raised window and leaned his head against the screen, feeling the cool touch of morning air on his forehead and cheeks. He could see his yard outside, dimly illuminated by the one light far down at the end of the cul-de-sac. Crickets chirped and chattered in the flower beds. Jarvey took a deep breath and then padded barefoot out to his parents’ bedroom door. He hesitated for only a moment before rapping on it with his knuckles, quic
kly but softly, rat-tat-tat.
He heard his dad’s sleepy voice: “Hmm? What is it? Come in.”
Jarvey pushed the door open. “Dad? Mom?”
His father clicked his bedside lamp on and sat up, his hair sticking every which way as he fumbled around on his bedside table for his glasses. “Jarvey? What time is it? What’s wrong? House on fire?”
Jarvey stood in the doorway, breathing hard. The rumpled man sitting up in the bed was his father, Dr. Cadmus Midion, and the sleepy-looking woman just getting up on her elbows was his mother, Samantha. “Are you guys okay?” Jarvey asked in a small voice.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” his mom asked, brushing her hair back out of her eyes. She sounded startled and concerned.
His dad had finally found his glasses, and he peered through them at his watch. “Five fifteen on a Saturday morning! This is a fine way to start your summer vacation, son. What’s wrong?”
“I—I thought I heard something,” Jarvey stammered. “A kind of—of explosion sound.”
“Thunder?” his mother asked, reaching for her robe. “Is it raining?”
“No,” Jarvey said. “It—it wasn’t really like thunder. Just a kind of boom.”
His father yawned. “Um. Sonic boom, maybe. Jet flying over very fast, but I didn’t hear anything. Did you, Samantha?”
“No.” Jarvey’s mom put her cool hand on his forehead. “Are you sure it wasn’t a dream, sweetheart?”
Jarvey didn’t think he had a fever, though his face felt hot with embarrassment. “Um, I don’t know, Mom. What day is today?”
“It’s Saturday,” his mother said promptly. “Oh, the date? It’s the first day of summer break.”
“For you, anyway,” his dad added. “I still have finals left to give before college is out for a week. Come on, what did you think you heard, Jarvey?”
Jarvey shook his head. “Must’ve been a dream, I guess. It’s all mixed up.” He paused and then said, “Dad, what’s a grimoire?”
His father’s eyebrows rose in evident surprise. “A what?”
“A grimoire,” Jarvey said. “It’s a word I, uh, heard somewhere.”
His father scratched his head, further ruffling his brownish-blond hair. “Book of some kind, isn’t it? Like a book about magic and that sort of thing?”
“Do we have one?”
Samantha Midion guided Jarvey over and made him sit on the foot of the bed. “Jarvey, you’re not making a lot of sense. What are you talking about?”
“I thought there was a Midion Grimoire,” Jarvey said slowly. “A book of magical spells and stuff Over in England.”
His mother and father exchanged a questioning glance. Then his dad said, “That must have been one doozy of a dream. Well, I’ve never heard of a Midion Grimoire, in England or anywhere else. I seem to associate grimoires with medieval alchemists, the guys who kept trying to turn lead into gold, without much success. Anyway, it’s an odd time of the morning to get curious about old books. Right now I’d suggest that you go back to bed and back to sleep for at least two more hours, champ. This is summer break! Get the most out of it!”
“Okay.” Jarvey pulled away from his mother’s arm and plodded out. He felt strangely dizzy and disoriented. The whole house was hot. Back in his room he switched on the radio and moved the pointer up and down the dial until he found a public radio station that was broadcasting the news. According to the newscaster, the temperature was in the high seventies and the date was the third of June. But wait, they had flown to England on the afternoon of June 6, hadn’t they?
Or had it been a dream?
Jarvey pinched himself, and the pinch hurt. He’d read or heard somewhere that you could wake yourself from a bad dream if you could pinch yourself hard enough, but nothing happened. What did that prove? He couldn’t get back to sleep, and so he dressed quietly and tiptoed downstairs. He opened the door and looked out across the quiet lawn. Vaguely he remembered something terrible about the moon, but he couldn’t see a moon at all, just the scattered, fading stars of early morning. He went back inside, to the family room, and switched on the TV.
Old movies, infomercials selling everything from get-rich-quick books to machines designed to make you lose weight, reruns of old, old TV shows, news and weather, everything looked normal as he used the remote to surf the channels. And the on-screen display agreed that today was the third of June, and if the year was right, he was still eleven until Thursday rolled around.
But how could that be? Jarvey remembered months and months of other things happening. He remembered ... what was her name? A red-haired girl who had helped him somehow. And Lunnon, a place called Lunnon, and a theater. No, he thought with a frown, the theater had to be part of a dream, a building as big as the whole world, ghosts in the seats, a strange family acting out the plays. Couldn’t be real. For that matter, time got all messed up in dreams. Sometimes he’d had nightmares of playing baseball, of smacking a good, sharp line drive and then running toward first base, except he was running in slow motion, hardly able to drag one foot in front of the other, while the other players raced around the field to scoop up the ball, make the throw to first, and put him out.
Still... still, he remembered, vaguely, a whole series of things that had to take weeks, if not months.
Restless, he switched off the TV and went back up to his room. His wall calendar had June 9 circled in red and in the space next to the date, in his own handwriting, were the words “Baseball tryouts.” He wanted to ... to pitch, that was it. This year he wanted to pitch. He’d been practicing. Donny Russell was good, but Jarvey thought he could beat him at pitching, could ... could get the position....
But hadn’t tryouts already happened? He tried to remember and thought of the big chain-link fence around the field and ... a big spider? No. This must have been a dream, he told himself
But he had to miss the tryouts, because they were set for the Friday after his family had flown to Lunnon. No, to ... to London. To Hag’s Court, the place was called.
He went back down to the den and turned on the computer. There was one way to check. He started the Internet browser his dad used and did a search for “Hag’s Court in London.” The search engine responded “Your search did not produce any result.” Okay, then, he thought, how about grimoire? This time he found an article that told him a grimoire was a book of magical information written between medieval times and the eighteenth century. The word came from Old French and was akin to grammar, because a grimoire dealt with the structures of magic spells, as a grammar book dealt with the structure of sentences ... and so on. Nothing about the Midion Grimoire anywhere. Nothing about the Midions, for that matter, at least his own family.
His mom and dad came downstairs at about eight, dressed but still looking a little sleepy. “You feeling better, champ?” his dad asked at the breakfast table.
“Yeah,” Jarvey said slowly. “I guess I am. I had a really weird dream last night. I thought we flew to England because you came into an inheritance.”
Dr. Cadmus Midion laughed. “I wish! I’m afraid we’re pretty much stuck at home this summer, because I’ve agreed to teach three summer session classes at the college. But we’ve been talking about a vacation. Maybe next year we’ll actually be able to go to London, Paris, and Rome for a couple of weeks. We’ll see.”
They ate their cornflakes, and when his dad finished reading the morning paper, Jarvey took it to his room and went through it page by page. It was the ordinary, everyday local paper, with a big front-page story about the building of a new church, another about a car crash that destroyed a truck and a car but didn’t hurt anyone too badly, and other stories about normal commonplace things. Even the comic strips were familiar.
His dad began mowing the lawn, the same exact way he had mowed it the week before they drove to the airport to fly to London—no, that hadn’t happened. But as he started out to help, Jarvey paused to pour his dad a tall glass of ice water and thought, I’ve done this before.
He tried to shrug off the feeling and took the glass out to his dad. “Thanks, son,” Dr. Midion said, taking a long sip and then fishing out his handkerchief to wipe his sweaty face.
Jarvey shivered, and thought to himself, He’s going to say this will be a scorcher of a summer and he wonders if it’s because of global warming.
“Hot already,” his dad remarked. “Going to be a scorcher of a summer, I think. I wonder if global warming is causing this.”
Jarvey closed his eyes. He had been here and done this already. He felt that he already knew everything his dad was going to say and do. The letter would come by noon, the long creamy envelope all the way from London, England, instructing Dr. Midion to be present on June 8 for the reading of the will of Thaddeus Midion, late of Hag’s Court.
But he forced a smile and took over the lawn mower, trimming the front lawn into increasingly smaller rectangles until he finished the job. His mom made lemonade for the family, and sitting at the table and sipping from the tall, frosty glass, Jarvey asked, “What is it when you already know what’s going to happen? When it’s like you’ve lived through that moment before?”
His mother frowned a little. “You mean déjà vu? That’s sort of a psychological state, I think.”
“French term,” his father put in. “It means ‘already seen.’ It’s kind of a creepy sense that everything that is happening right now has happened before. I read somewhere that it’s caused by a lag between what you see or hear and the way your brain processes the information.”
Slowly, Jarvey said, “I think you’re going to get a letter from England today, Dad.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever received a letter from England in my whole life,” Dr. Midion said, sounding surprised. “What makes you say that, son?”
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